This week we’re joined by Marcy Sutton. Marcy is a interactive developer at Substantial in Seattle. We take a deep dive into web components, accessibility, Angular JS, AJAX, ARIA, and more!

We talked about (roughly in order):

Q & A:

17:56 Do you know of any standard way that accessibility-aware web devs will test whether their ARIA-related efforts have proven successful? Is there some screen-reader or browser-extension of choice (or just your personal recommendation)?

26:00 Our client’s accessibility consultant is telling them that they must have valid HTML in order to be WCAG 2.0 compliant. Is that true?

30:46 With the prevalence of front-end frameworks like AngularJS, there seems to be a rise in logging in via AJAX instead of a traditional post back. I’m all for AJAX in almost every case on a web app, but when it comes to login/logout, I feel the perceived load time is much better for a traditional post back. I haven’t done any A/B testing on this with real users yet, but I’d love to hear your thoughts!

42:19 My question is concerning aria attributes placed on icon fonts, and the accessibility issues that can arise if you use the wrong one. For the past year or so at the agency I work at, we’ve been using icon fonts and slapping an aria-hidden=”true” on all of them. Recently I learned of the aria-label and aria-labelled by attributes. Dave, since you’re the accessibility master, what’s the best and/or proper way to use these different attributes?

54:30 What do you guys think about minifying html?

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Show Links:

Marcy Sutton

Marcy Sutton on Twitter

Substantial

Chrome ExtensionAccessibility Developer Tools

Web Aim

Tenon.io

Drink Distiller

Cascading Attribute Sheets